


A Whole Day Nearer Now

by NeurotropicAgentX



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ancestor-Era, F/M, No Major Character Death, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Rare Pair, Sadstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-14
Updated: 2016-09-14
Packaged: 2018-08-15 00:34:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8035150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeurotropicAgentX/pseuds/NeurotropicAgentX
Summary: ‘You’re the first hallucination that’s tried to convince me its real, so I’m awarding you extra points for fucked-up.’ He grinned at her. ‘Now tell me you’ll die if I close my eyes.’The Demoness cocked her head. ‘I not die. You might.’





	A Whole Day Nearer Now

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thank you to my editor for her invaluable assistance

Time was hers. It was a small consolation, but she blinked, flickered and phased through the timestream, appearing exactly where she wanted to be. (Where Scratch wanted her to be. She didn’t think about that.) Some arcane mission had led her to the Condesce’s flagship. This wasn’t unusual. Even in the few precious moments of time she really owned she often turned up here to scope out her fated nemesis. 

Today she was here only to hide the Condesce’s second favourite necklace in the helmsblock for some reason. It was a waste of her talents and brought the Demoness only the mildest satisfaction of being a petty nuisance. 

She dropped the garish item on the floor of the helmsblock and prepared to rip a portal with her wands. 

‘Well, you’re an unusually vivid hallucination. Come here often?’ A voice asked. 

She spun around with a snarl, looking for the source of the disturbance. It was the helmstroll, of course. The Demoness wasn’t one to feel embarrassed, but the corner of her lip peeled back in a sneer.

‘No hallucination.’

The helmstroll snorted. Biowires connected him to the support column of the main engine. She could sense strong psionics surrounding him, but so much of it was being channelled back into the ship.

‘You’re the first hallucination that’s tried to convince me its real, so I’m awarding you extra points for fucked-up.’ He grinned at her. ‘Now tell me you’ll die if I close my eyes.’

The Demoness cocked her head. ‘I not die. You might.’

‘Ha!’ The sound was sharp and bitter and nothing like a laugh. It made acid rise in the back of the Demoness’ protein chute. ‘That’ll be the night.’ When the helmstroll’s not-mirth had stopped he looked at her for a long moment. ‘It’s embarrassing, but I don’t remember who you’re supposed to be. Some troll I met back on Alternia?’

‘I Demoness, not your stupid hallucination.’

The helmstroll went very still for a moment and the next thing the Demoness noticed was a change in the psionic currents. His power reached out, very weakly, and brushed against her own. She lashed back, but not too hard. He flinched, the wires rippling slightly with his movement. ‘Sorry.’ His mouth flap poked out between his teeth and wetted his lips. ‘Are you _really_ the Demoness?’

She shrugged. It didn’t matter what he believed. 

‘Huh. Have you come to finally wreak a bloody maelstrom against the Fish-bitch? Please say yes.’

The Demoness gave a grim smile. ‘Not now. Later, yes.’

‘Do you have a timeline on that?’ he asked.

‘I have all timelines.’

‘Less helpful than you might think,’ he said.

She shrugged. He wasn’t wrong. Without further words, she ripped an entry into the time stream and stepped out of the helmsblock. Scratch was calling her to the next task, but she would be back to this place. The helmsman was interesting, not a threat, and strangely not afraid of her. 

///

The Demoness reappeared about a week later. Or the hallucination did, Psii still wasn’t entirely convinced that he hadn’t made the whole thing up.

‘How do you even get here?’ he asked as soon as she turned to face him. 

She shrugged. ‘Through time, I appear, change things, disappear. Easy.’

Psii grunted. ‘Got an ETA on that bloody conflict yet?’

She sneered. ‘No.’

‘Come on! Are you running on some fucking schedule? The longer you leave her alive the more harm she does to everyone. You’re like the most powerful troll ever and here you are down in the helmsblock idling with a fucking helmsman! Just kill her already!’

‘Not my choice,’ the Demoness spat. ‘You not only one tied up.’

Psii’s lips peeled back from his fangs. ‘Look, sugar-spheres, you’re not hooked up to a fucking spaceship! You come and go as you please, fucking shit up and vanishing again. Forgive me if I think you’d find it hard to understand what _centauries_ of enslavement to her Imperious Fish-Bitch is like,’ he said.

The Demoness got right up close to his bioware column and She looked him dead in the eyes. What he read in them made his breath catch. Those eyes were ancient and had no place in a lowblood face. They were filled with a dull exhaustion and an aching malice.

‘I know slavery. I know pure not-pitch hate. Hate that burns away everything. Nothing left. I _know_ centuries, tiny-little psionic freak.’

The Psiioniic tried to regain some equilibrium. It never occurred to him to doubt a single thing she just said. ‘Coming on a little strong there, Demoness. Telling me all about your damage without a single pap? My blood pusher would be going into shock if every part of my bio-ware wasn’t controlled by the ship and my self-designed programs.’

The Demoness sneered at him and raised a hand in what could only be a threat. He diverted power from the auxiliary engines and channelled real power through his own flesh for the first time in perigees. Their psionics met in a cascading stream of power. It broke over both of them in wave, sending hot prickles through the remainder of Psii’s nerves. 

The Demoness reeled with the backlash, but she was grinning. ‘Not bad for broken down old ship,’ she said. This time she moved quickly and ran her fingertips down the side of his face. Psii was too stunned to even think of countering. It had been so long since he’d felt that kind of touch from another troll. The lights in the helmsblock flickered as he forced away memories of another shockingly warm touch too many lifetimes away.

The Demoness was giving him a strange look like she couldn’t quite work him out. She looked down at her hand like she’d contaminated it.

‘You have Starship cooties now,’ Psii said, aiming for casual and missing it by lightyears.

The Demoness nodded slowly, still looking a little stunned. ‘Yes. Starship cooties. Bleak prognosis, no recovery. May as well chop hand off.’ Her gaze slid away from his. ‘Maybe need to be sure though. Maybe do it again?’ It was definitely a question.

He’d gotten a taste of her psionics, she was fucking strong and kind of scary and for some reason all he could see in her was a messed-up kind of vulnerability. It had been _way_ too long since he’d been papped. This was ridiculous.

‘Sure,’ he said, his voice hardly cracking at all. ‘Wouldn’t want to cut it off for no reason. Go ahead.’

This time he was ready when her hot palm cupped the side of his face and slid along his jaw. She was staring hard at him as she moved her hand up and ran it down the bridge of his nose and then smoothed her fingertips over his eyelids. He didn’t open his eyes after she stopped. (Fuck. He hadn’t been ready.) When he opened his eyes again she was gone. Maybe she had been a hallucination. 

///

‘Oh you’re back, good. It feels less like you’re a hallucination if there’s continuity,’ Psii said as the Demoness appeared to step out of a door that didn’t exist in the middle of the empty space of the helmsblock. She seemed more agitated this time and paced back and forth. He wanted to pap her. There was probably something deeply wrong with him.

After three full circuits of the helmsblock, the Demoness walked over to him and sat down, twitching her skirts minutely to settle around her. She leaned her back against the column that grew around his legs. Obviously it was impossible for him to feel the heat of her through the wetwear, but a part of him imagined he could. It wasn’t really a trust display to put her back against him while he was suspended, but it was a nice thought.

‘So, are you still linear with me?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ came her clipped reply. ‘You confessed your undying devotion. I threw up at your patheticness. Very romantic. We cuddled.’

He snorted, a reluctant smile tugging at his lips. ‘That sounds about right, but you forgot the part where I brushed your hair and you giggled and then swooned. Well, you giggled and swooned simultaneously, it was very impressive.’

There was a hash grating sound and it took Psii a moment to realise that the Demoness was _laughing_. ‘Yes, very impressive. No one swoons like me. My swoons have body-count.’

‘I’d believe it.’

The Demoness nodded, seemingly distracted. ‘I kill a lot. Fuck up Alternia, prepare it for… employer.’ Her head drooped slightly, exposing the back of her neck. Psii’s mouth went dry at the trust display. He reached out with his power, very cautiously, and let psionic pressure smooth along her neck from hairline to shoulders. She tensed and an apology was on the tip of his internal mouth flap, but then some of the stiffness left her shoulders and she leaned back the barest fraction. Psii kept his power to a steady soothing touch, occasionally batting at the fascinating loops of her hanging hairstyle to watch them swing.

The Demoness eventually spoke again. ‘I’m tired. I don’t want. I want it to stop. All of it. No more tick-ticking all time, all place. Just silence.’

‘Yeah,’ Psii agreed, a wash of pale pity for this all-powerful wreck of a troll squeezing his blood pusher. ‘I get that.’

She stood up and brushed off her dress. It was perfectly clean, but it did mean she wasn’t looking him in the eyes. She leaned forward and placed a light kiss against his pan plane, just below the hairline. Then she reached up and touched one set of his horns with two fingers. Psii frowned as he tried to work out what she was doing by feeling it out with his psionics.

‘Wait,’ he said, ‘are you making a diamond shape against one of my horns?’

The Demoness smirked at him. ‘Yes. Very romantic.’ With that she side-stepped and disappeared.

‘Thanks for not throwing up on me!’ Psii shouted after her. It might have been his imagination, but he thought he heard the scratchy rattle of her laugh.

///

She was pacing as soon as she stepped trough her nothingness portal. Her psionics crackled around the room with a disturbing intensity. It meant he was reluctant to add his own power to the mix, which really only left the verbal approach. 

‘Stop wearing a hole through my floor and come cuddle, you pale disaster.’

She stopped pacing and walked right up to him instead. She looked pissed. Maybe the verbal approach wasn’t the best way to do this. She stood right in his space, nearly nose-to-nose and just breathed heavily at him for a while.

‘Shoosh?’ he offered uncertainly. She wrapped her arms around him and his support column, clinging like this was their first pile. (They’d never had a pile). 

‘Okay? Are we still linear?’

‘Shut noise-hole, just let me… sorry.’

It was first time he’d heard any sort of sorry, or for that matter, any vague admission of some kind of fault from her. It set his fangs on edge. He did ‘shut his noise-hole’ though. Her psionics were subsiding, so he reached out with his own power to drag through her hair and around her horn-beds. She shivered against him and her death-grip gradually subsided.

‘Wanna talk about it?’ Psii asked.

The Demoness _literally flinched_ and nodded against his thorax. Psii was getting even more worried.

‘I can’t kill you,’ she finally said.

A welter of emotions surged in Psii and the lights in the helmblock went out entirely. Death. When was the last time he’d ever even _hoped_ for it? ‘Why not?’ his traitorous noise-hole asked. 

‘Selfishness.’

Oh fuck. He understood, really he did. He wasn’t about to kill her after all, but part of that was that he didn’t think it would stick, not with what she’d been saying about her… employer. She probably could kill him, but then she’d be alone. 

‘I. Fuck. Put a guy on the spot, why don’t you?’ The Demoness kept quiet. ‘Look, it’s okay. I never expected something like that from you and, shit, we don’t know that Fish-bitch wouldn’t find some way to bring me back.’

The Demoness looked up at him. ‘Shouldn’t stop me trying… for diamond.’

Psii’s bloodpusher did a strange thing that registered on his bio-scans. Her diamond. ‘Then I’m your diamond too and I wouldn’t ask that from you. Besides, it’s been good having you come by. I’d miss it.’

‘Wouldn’t miss anything if you _dead_.’

Psii snorted. Then he let the silence stretch for a long moment. ‘We do both get to die, you know. At the end.’

The Demoness looked up sharply. ‘How you know?’

Psii shrugged as best he could with his biowires. ‘I know when someone’s doomed. I’ve always had a kind of sense about mortality.’

The Demoness’ gaze was sharp on his face. ‘You… know that?’

Psii glanced away. ‘When you’ve been alive this long, you pick things up.’

The silence stretched again. This time she broke it. ‘Both of us?’ Her voice was softer than he’d ever heard it.

‘Yeah,’ said the Psiioniic. ‘I promise.’


End file.
